good elephant pottery

"Harriet" has been busy.

8/26/2020

I mentioned this on my blog once before, that whenever I am engaged in DIY home improvement projects, I refer to myself in the third person as "Harriet Homeowner." This summer, I have been working on my house more than I have been making pots. Partly because I am not traveling for shows, and have not needed as many pots. And partly because this is how I deal with chaos, by putting my house into perfect order.

Whenever I complete a project successfully, especially if it's something I wasn't sure I could do by myself, I like to raise both arms in the air and declare "I AM HARRIET."

I'll start with the biggest and most impactful project, though technically does not count as a Harriet project. I now have what I am unabashedly calling "real f*cking air conditioning." I got a mini-split heat pump system for my whole house. I had been living with window units for 20+ years. The difference in incredible. We've had some prolonged heat waves this summer, and I sailed through them. I plan to keep using my boiler and hot water radiators for heat, but now I have a backup heat system in case the boiler ever needs work.

This was a project I had saved up for last year, and was just waiting for the spring to do it. Then came the pandemic, and I decided to put it on hold, thinking I might need my savings account for other things. As I've been writing about on the blog this summer, I have found other ways to keep my pottery income flowing. So I went ahead with the mini-split.

I had to move everything out of the way for the mini-split contractors to work. Before I put everything back into place, Harriet decided to tackle a project that she had put off for way too long. There was one last room in my house, the smallest bedroom, that had never been painted.

Although it is the smallest bedroom, it gets the best natural light in the house, at all hours of the day. So it is where I take photographs of my pottery. It also gets used to store miscellany. Before I put everything back, I purged out a bunch of the stored stuff.

The paint for the above room was free, because I had a whole can leftover from when I painted my office a few years ago, which is right next to the above room. When I was done, I had a quarter can left, and I started thinking about the guest room, which is on the other side of this room. I had painted the guest room yellow about ten years ago, and I was tired of the color. So I went out a bought another gallon of this paint, and painted the guest room too.

The walls in the guest room went from yellow to gray, which means I did not need to replace the yellow and gray curtains. Harriet was pleased with that. Now all three rooms in this area of the house (office, photo room, guest room) are all the same color.

My house was full of bad light fixtures. Old, worn-out looking, and builder grade. I spent a lot of time shopping for new ones. I tend to prefer modern designs, but my house is 85 years old. I tried to walk the line between "clean and simple" and "1930s appropriate."

All of the light switch and outlet cover plates on the first floor of my house had been painted over many times. I swear I wasn't the first one to do it! But I admit I did it too during previous painting projects. Harriet said "enough!" The switches and outlets themselves were so dingy, and many of the outlets were so loose, plugs would fall out of them.

They have all been replaced, with new components that match the ones on the second floor of my house, which was completely renovated last fall. I even installed a nifty dimmer switch for the dining room (which can now accommodate either a sewing project or a fancy dinner) and a combination GFCI outlet/light switch for the bathroom. All of the old outlets were two-prong outlets. I learned that these can be replaced with grounded three-prong outlets as long as you have metal outlet boxes and armored (or BX) wiring. This is common in old houses like mine. A grounding wire can be attached to the metal outlet box. For those who are surprised that I did all this electrical work myself, anyone who can maintain an electric kiln can easily learn how to replace light fixtures, switches, and outlets.

While I was touching up the paint around the new light fixtures and switches in the downstairs bathroom, I discovered that the paint in the can no longer matched the paint on the wall. I stirred and stirred and stirred, but it was off by a shade and a half. It looked terrible. So I repainted the whole bathroom.

Now that it's done, I don't mind that this happened, because I'm really into this new color. While I was in here painting, I decided to replace the sink faucet as well. The old one had a "chrome" finish that was corroding away. My memories are fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure it was a cheap model. This new one wasn't terribly expensive either, I chose it because it was the closest match design-wise to the tub's faucet. I hope it holds up better than the last one. I had always regarded the medicine cabinet and exhaust fan as "things that must be replaced eventually, because they are so old." I've had a change of heart. During this project, I scrubbed and shined up the outside of the medicine cabinet, and gave the inside a fresh coat of paint. The exhaust fan's cover plate had been painted over many times. I took it down and scrubbed off all the layers of paint, back to bare metal. Now it's feels nice to keep things that are original to the house, "because they are so old."

Harriet is done. For now. I can't think of a single thing that needs to be worked on right now.

Some of you might be thinking, "it looks like she's getting her house ready to sell it." My answer is that the plan is not imminent, but you're not wrong. I would like to enjoy the air conditioning for at least a while.

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Getting dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new world.

8/21/2020

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The pandemic has now been hovering over us for over five months. All of my shows through the end of 2020 have been cancelled. I’m sad, and a little angry at those who think the public health restrictions don’t apply to them. I miss doing shows, but I would rather give them up in order to take the fastest path out of the crisis. I see other countries having festivals again already, and I feel embarrassed about the US.

I do feel generally happy with my home state of Maryland, for understanding the situation and choosing smart policies. We still have pockets of dumbassery here, but it’s not as rampant as in other parts of the country. When I leave my house, which is rare, I feel safe. Everyone I see is masked, and everyone keeps their distance.

Initially, my pandemic plan was to stay home, keep making pots, and live off my savings account. I thought we would be doing shows again in the fall, at the latest. Well, that proved to be wrong. Right now, there is no clear indication that we can have shows in 2021 either.

As I talked about in my last blog post, before the pandemic I had vowed to never ship pottery again. I found a way to sell pottery without shipping it, which is to sell pots online to local DC/Baltimore area customers, then deliver the pots in person. I also did a sale like this for the State College, PA area. I am planning to do one for the Philadelphia area in the fall. These places are not too far from home. My mailing list contains many nice contacts for these areas, because of the number of shows I have done there.

I am wary about how many times I can reach out to my local customers this way. One of my business goals is to constantly add a steady stream of new fans to my mailing list. This is accomplished by doing shows, and meeting new people at every one. So by selling in the “home delivery” model, I am tapping my existing audience, but not growing it.

My mailing list also contains contacts in further places too. But the numbers get a lot more sparse. I felt like I also needed to reach places where I could not make home deliveries. I was having an argument with my brain. “Just face it you have to start shipping pots again.” “NOOOOO!!!!!” “But you can reach the entirety of your mailing list all at once.” “BUT TRASH, BREAKAGE, ANXIETY, WASTED TIME!!” “You only have to do it until the pandemic is over, which will happen eventually.”

I thought back to my previous online sales. During those long, tedious hours of packing, whenever I picked up an order sheet that only contained one small item, I would brighten up. Small items are the fastest and easiest to pack. They only require a small amount of packing materials. And because the boxes are small and light, they are the least likely to suffer damage during shipping.

So this is the settlement I negotiated with my brain. I would ship pots again, but only small pots, and only a limited number. And only until I can do shows again.

I developed some miniaturized versions of my existing designs, just for these sales.

I have now completed two “small pots only” online sales. I learned a lot from the first one. Online sales are very different from art festivals. When dealing with customers face to face, they are polite to me, and polite to fellow customers. An online sale is more like the wild, wild west. There’s no waiting for your turn in a line. Customers race to check out as fast as possible. A lot of seasoned online shoppers seemed to know this beforehand. But some of my mailing list customers were not prepared. I got several emails afterwards from customers complaining that the store “didn’t work” because items just disappeared from their cart. Most of them were nice about it, albeit disappointed. One of them was really mad.

For the second edition of the online sale, I included the following language in my marketing emails and social media posts: “Last time, the pots sold out in minutes. If you have an item in your cart, it is still available to everyone until you finish paying for it. If an item disappears from your cart, that's because somebody else paid for it first. Be prepared! Speed counts!” I did not get any complaints afterwards. I realize now that communicating how the shopping cart works, and that there is an unmoderated race to checkout, is my responsibility.

Here’s another thing I learned. I sent some marketing messages that talked about both my first “small pots only” online sale, and my “home delivery” sale for State College, PA. They were scheduled about two weeks apart, and I wanted to give the State College customers an ample amount of notice. This was a mistake. Some customers conflated the two events. When the State College sale went live, I got orders from all over the country. I had to cancel more orders than I accepted. Once again, most of the customers whose orders were cancelled were nice about it. But one customer in particular simply could not understand why I was refusing to ship his order. Argh.

I learned to never advertise two events at the same time, because this causes confusion. I need to schedule the events far enough apart, so they each have enough room for an their own, exclusive marketing campaign. It was never a problem to advertise more than one art festival at the same time. These events have clear, physical boundaries. Only those who attend in person can purchase. But the online space is just one big, vague space. Defining the parameters of an online event takes a lot more effort and care.

The entire inventory of one online sale.

I’m really happy with my decision to only ship small pots. My definition of “small pot” is one that can ship in a 9x9x9 inch box. This drastically simplified the sourcing of packing materials. I only need to buy two sizes of boxes: 9x9x9 for one pot, and 16x9x9 for two pots. One of the biggest drags about my previous online sales was when I had a large or weirdly-shaped pot, and no appropriate box. Buying boxes efficiently requires buying bundles of 25. It sucks when you only need one of a odd size box.

I offered 40 small pots in the first sale. The packing took about 4 hours, which I found manageable. Packing the boxes was so much faster, and less mentally taxing, than packing pots of a whole range of sizes.

In the second sale, I offered 50 pots. Predictably, the packing took 5 hours, which was also manageable. However, I think I will go back to 40 for future sales. 50 pots took 3.25 bags of peanuts. That’s inefficient in terms of sourcing, I don’t want to buy 4 bags of peanuts and have so much leftover. 40 pots required 2.5 bags of peanuts. Having half a bag leftover makes more sense, and the leftovers easily fit into sourcing for the next sale. Maybe I can pack 45 pots with just under 3 whole bags of peanuts? That would be even more convenient, and might be worth trying.

Sourcing the packing materials is drastically simplified when all of the pots are roughly the same size.

For those who think online selling is “easier” than shows, I’m not so sure. It certainly doesn’t involve any heavy lifting. Or dealing with bad weather. But it still takes a lot of time to put together an online sale. The pots need to be photographed, the photographs need to be edited, then uploaded to the store, along with descriptions/prices/inventory counts. The store’s user interface is a website, and all the steps are done with mousing and clicking, not keyboarding. It’s tedious and slow. It’s easy to skip a step, or to do things inconsistently. It requires paying close attention to something that is very boring. At a show, I can setup a canopy and a full display in less than 3 hours. For an online sale, even though I now have all of my item descriptions saved in a text file for copy/pasting, it still took about 5 hours to put the whole sale together. Not to mention, one of the big reasons why I was so eager to quit doing design work, and opt for a pottery studio instead, is because I was tired of sitting in front of a computer all day. It's also much easier and more civilized to work with customers in person at a show, and to convey your communications more clearly. And as I described above, customers feel more entitled to be argumentative and demanding from across an online space, and misunderstandings are a lot more common.

Putting together an online sale is actually very time consuming. All the check marks ensure that I don't skip a step.

I think it’s important to mention that I really don’t have a big social media following. I don’t have 50K Instagram followers. I have about 8K Instagram followers, and 1.2K Facebook followers. I like to use both platforms, but do not view them as sales generators. I have no interest in playing those games that drive up your follower numbers. Nor will I try to make my pottery studio look “pretty” all the time, because that’s not real. I’ve advocated for many years on this blog that a mailing list is far more valuable than a big social media following. My online sales are coming from the following sources: 1) customers in cities where I travelled once for a show but haven’t returned, 2) customers who used to live in the DC area but have moved away, 3) fans of my blog, which is a very niche audience but those who get it really get it, and 4) students of my online pottery school. My mailing list currently has about 1400 contacts (after recently purging a bunch of contacts so I can continue to use MailChimp for free). So although my following isn’t huge, the connections are more meaningful than the average social media follower. Having spent many years developing an audience of this depth has proven to be invaluable during this crisis. I’ve had to totally reinvent the way I sell my work, and this audience has responded amazingly, both for the “home delivery” sales and for the “small pots only” online sales.

Even though I got a few unhappy notes after the first online sale, on balance I got so many more nice notes! They were thanking me for making my pots available to them. Although I am still shipping pots on a “grudgingly” basis, I admit that it makes me feel good to discover that people in far off places have been waiting for a chance to buy my work.

It took some experience to get my bearings, and correct some mistakes, but I think I’ve made peace with all of my misgivings. The narrow parameters make it work for me. My “home delivery” sales are my main source of income right now, but these online sales are a worthwhile supplement. I’m willing to do it on a regular basis, until we can put this pandemic behind us.

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"Harriet" has been busy.

Getting dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new world.

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